


layers of scar

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a softer animorphs [5]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Break Up, F/M, General Guilt, Guilt, Multi, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Survivor Guilt, The Animorphs Have PTSD, Trials, Unrequited Love, War Crime Trials, so obviously spoilers, sort of, specifically, that tag is especially for you meghan, the timeline is ambiguous because I disdain canon when I can make it worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-15 22:24:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11240505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: I have loved since you.  But when the new paint gets scratched, there you are underneath. (My heart is layers of scar.)Ronnie loves her, is the thing here.  That doesn't make it easy, and that doesn't make it what Cassie needs.





	layers of scar

**Author's Note:**

> I'm operating under the assumption here that Visser One is the _last_ trial because then they can use the verdicts from all the others against him, and also because I have to think that investigating a years-long secret war to assemble prosecution and defense must take a long-ass time. You can either assume that Ronnie and Cassie get together earlier than in the book or that the trial is happening later, but I'm going with the latter.
> 
> Also! I'm pretty sure I stole someone's last-name headcanons. So, if you read this and recognize those as yours, shout-out to you and let me know if you want me to change them, because they came from somewhere during the four month haze of comfort-reading Animorphs while I finished my thesis and I have no idea who I mugged for those.
> 
> For music, I recommend The Noose by A Perfect Circle for the first half, and Sorry by Halsey for the conversation with Ronnie.

It’s not easy, dating a legend.  Cassie knows it.  Ronnie—bless his heart—does pretty well with it, bears up under the ever-present weight of the camera eye, watches with delight when she grows wings or hooves or teeth, holds onto her when she shakes awake and lets her cry, gives her space when she needs it.  He’s a good guy, Ronnie is.  He kisses her like she’s something precious and swings their joined hands together when they’re out, sings to her and dances with her, never startles her or comes at her too quickly if she’s not ready for it.

He loves her, that’s the point here.  He loves her for _Cassie_ , not Cassie Day, Animorph and savior.

She loves him too.  She thinks so, anyway.

She’s pretty sure.

(She doesn’t even know what love is, Cassie thinks that sometimes.  All she knows of love is her parents, who never fought a war, and kisses with other creature’s blood in her mouth and the desperate gentleness of people who expected their touch to be a killing blow.  She knows love from fairy tales and tragedies—love, Cassie thinks, looks like a hawk with an urn, like flying into the sun, like Icarus.  She has no idea if she loves Ronnie.  She would survive his loss.  Grieve, maybe, but survive.  Sometimes she thinks that means she doesn’t love him after all.)

But Ronnie loves her.  That part, he seems sure of, so Cassie takes it at face value and tries not to overthink it.  He loves her so much that he comes with her to the trial—the worst part.  Cassie thought when the war was over that they would be done.  She had even hoped, in her darkest, most vicious moments, that Visser Three—now Visser One, but always Visser Three where it counts—would be a casualty of war, out of their hands and on to God or Crayak or whoever judged parasitic despots in the afterlife.

Nothing is ever fucking easy.

The trial is even worse than she expected.  This is, in its way, almost impressive, because her expectations were frankly abysmal.  Eva and Alloran walk in together, two prisoners free at last and barely standing, but alive.  Cassie manages to brace herself for their arrival and the instinctive response to Alloran’s presence— _morph and rip his throat out while he’s still shocked_ —is minimal. 

She feels a little guilty for feeling it, that moment of blind homicidal hate.  Alloran, no matter what else he’s done, doesn’t deserve to spend the rest of his life trapped in the role of the Visser, forever inseparable in her mind from the monster who had kept him captive.

She still feels it.

Marco is there.  They’ve talked, in the time since the war ended, some.  He’s doing as well as can be expected, maybe even better than could have been hoped, at the end.  Ax is there, awkward with his new rank and almost breathlessly relieved to see them.

Tobias is probably in the area.  Cassie thinks she catches a glimpse of a young, tired face with sandy hair, but it could be anyone, and he doesn’t announce his presence.

Rachel’s absence _burns_ , like a torch in a dark night.

Jake isn’t really there.  His body is, maybe some parts or even most of his mind, but he looks a little like he’s boxed up his soul and left it somewhere else for safekeeping.  He looks hollow, as if the end of the war stole the vital spark from inside his chest, the thing that drove him and held him up and kept him alive to keep them all alive.  His face is older, hard lines and deep hollows, back stiff when he’s in public and shoulders very square, bigger and more looming than she remembers him being even at their worst moments.  He looks very much the war hero, or at least very much like a statue of one.

Cassie forgets about Ronnie holding her hand, for a minute, when she sees Jake.  Just for a minute.  It’s the shock of it—somehow she forgot that he would be here.  She tells herself that.

She really does forget Ronnie outright when the defense attorney puts Jake on the witness stand and sets in to destroy him.  Marco is on his feet beside her, Ax’s bullwhip tail taut and ready to snap beside him, and she’s on her feet too, because _no_ , Jake doesn’t deserve this, she won’t watch this, if she can’t stop it she’ll run out of the courtroom and damn the paparazzi’s eyes.  The man on her other side is saying something, trying to calm her, his hand on hers, and Cassie pulls away from him.  The room is buzzing, dissatisfied.  Jake is their savior, a hero, and his actions on the Pool ship don’t change that, won’t change that, might even support that, and the defense attorney is burning through the jury’s good will like tissue paper.

God, Jake looks so young, alone on the witness stand.

The judge shuts the defense attorney down and they go to a recess, and Cassie flees the courtroom, cursing herself for a coward.  It’s only after Ronnie finds her, curled up behind the building where no one ever goes and staring at the hawk wheeling overhead—she can’t make out its coloring at this distance—that she remembers he even exists.

Ronnie sits down on the ground beside her, back to the wall, and doesn’t say anything.  Just sits there, waiting for her breathing to ease.  It’s what she needs, she thinks.

(She wants someone to hug her and tell her that the two of them can go teach the defense attorney a lesson, and maybe stomp Visser Three’s little box while they’re at it.  Rachel isn’t there to do it.  Ronnie is too good to do it.  Cassie tells herself she doesn’t need to hear it, even if she would shoot it down.)

“We have to help him,” Cassie finally hears, breaking the silence, and it’s her voice, low and tear-ragged and a thousand miles away.  She feels like she did the few times they had to leave someone in enemy hands, like she _left Jake to die_ and she’s been trying to figure out the nature of love while he bled out slowly.  She’s having flashbacks to finding the tiger broken and bloody on the floor of the mall, to teeth and clawmarks from an ally.  And she did leave him, she _did_ , she knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—reach out after the war and she took the out, knowing full well that she was running, knowing full well that he didn’t have it in him to chase her anymore, if he ever really had.  Not after Tom.  Not after Rachel.  Jake was scared to death of the blood on his hands, like a man waking up after a nightmare and too unwilling to burden anyone to even tell them.  “God, we have to help him.”

And she gets up and runs back toward the doors without checking to see if Ronnie is coming.

Ronnie’s still awake when Cassie gets back to the hotel room that night, _late_ that night, sea water still dripping from her morphing outfit even after the osprey morph.  She lands on the balcony and demorphs, and even though it’s late and it’s been the longest day of maybe her whole life—battle goes fast, but this trial is going to drag on, she can tell—she’s smiling, energetic.  Jake had been so furious with them.  It had been like someone ripping back a curtain to let daylight spill through.

Jake might live through this after all, she thinks.  She’s going to do what she should have done before and keep in touch, drag him out of his house from time to time.  Marco, rightfully, had snarled at her when she proposed her solution to Jake’s depression— _right, now you care_ —and Cassie hadn’t said he was wrong.  But she’s going to do better.  Listening to Jake yell at them for recklessness had shaken all the cobwebs out of her, pulling dust covers off parts of her heart she tries not to think about and mostly manages to ignore, and she feels oddly…whole now that they’re hers again.

“Hey, Ronnie, couldn’t sleep?” she asks, and ducks down to kiss his cheek where he’s sitting in a chair.

“Hey, Cass,” he murmurs, and catches her hand before she can pass by.

“You okay?”

He links their fingers together and looks at her like he’s waiting to wake up from a pleasant dream.  “Yeah,” he says, and kisses the back of her hand, oddly formal.  “I’m fine.  Love you.”

She should push that, ask what’s wrong, but she doesn’t.  She just gives him a smile and squeezes his hand a bit before she walks into the bathroom to shower, leaving him there.

When she flops gracelessly down on the bed, curls up to go to sleep with Ronnie on the other side of the bed, he murmurs, “You love him, don’t you.”

Cassie knows a trap when she sees one and unsubtly freezes up.  “Um.”

“It’s okay,” Ronnie says.  “You don’t have to explain.  You’ve never looked at me like that.”

“I don’t look at Jake,” Cassie says, and it’s true, lately.  They hadn’t seen each other in most of a year, before this. 

“Yeah, you do,” Ronnie says gently—he’s so gentle with her, like she’s going to spook.  “Like he’s the only person in the room.”  He pauses.  “No, that’s not right.  Like he’s real, and everyone else around him is just an illusion.”

“Ronnie…”

“Cass,” he says, interrupting her kindly, before she has to decide what the hell kind of justification she’s planning to include there.  “I knew going in that there was someone else.  I just didn’t realize how much you still loved him.”  He reaches out across the space between them and takes her hand again, a friendly, anchoring grip this time.  “You deserve the best, Cass.  If Jake Berenson is the best, you deserve that.”

“I’m not—I don’t—Ronnie, I--”  The sentence doesn’t get away from her, but only because she doesn’t have any idea what she’s trying to say.  “I left him, after the war,” she finally manages to get out, semi-cogent at least.

“You regret it?”

“No, of course not,” she says automatically, and there’s a long beat of silence before she lets out a heavy breath.  “Yes,” she admits quietly, clinging to his hand and admitting what’s sat heavy in her chest for almost a year.  “Yes, God, I regret it so much.  I just…Jake was so shattered.”

“It’s hard to love someone in the aftermath,” Ronnie says, and he sounds wry and wise and sad.

Cassie laughs a little at that.  “Yeah,” she says.  “I took the out.  I was just…God, I was so tired and hurt and I just needed…I needed to pretend it never happened,” she whispered.

“It’s not a sin to need space,” Ronnie tells her.

“I know that,” she says, voice still soft.  “But he forgave me for everything.  I should have been able to forgive him for taking the consequences of my actions.”  She pauses, laughs again, more rueful.  “I’m sure you’re enjoying this trip down memory lane.”

Ronnie hums, not quite disagreement but definitely not agreeing either.  “Cass,” he says, just as quiet as she is.  “I love you.”

“I know you do,” she says.

“I don’t love you enough to play second fiddle to someone you never even see.  I don’t deserve that.”

“I know that too.”

“I’ll always be your friend.”

“Thank you,” Cassie says, and for the second time in one day, bursts into tears.  It’s quiet, a tame sobbing fit mostly confined to the occasional hitching breath and shaking hands, but Ronnie pulls her close and lets her clutch at his shirt, soothing a hand up and down her spine as she shudders.  He’s _such_ a good guy.  “I’m sorry,” she gasps into his collarbone.  “I’m so sorry, Ronnie, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Cass,” Ronnie says. 

“I wish I didn’t love him.”

“No, you don’t.”

No, she doesn’t.  She wishes that she did.  When did this guy get to know her so well?

“I’m sorry,” Cassie murmurs again when her tears have stopped, leaving her feeling worn and raw.  Ronnie is still rubbing a hand up and down her back, gentle.  Her skin is smooth under the fabric of her shirt, the eternally perfect skin of a morph-capable warrior, unmarred and without scar.  She doesn’t even have stretch marks anymore.  All the scars are inside, built up around her heart and lying in wait at the darkest parts of her mind, and this, her and Jake and all the damage inherent in that phrase, isn’t the biggest or the rawest, but it’s self-inflicted and holds a certain level of ruin for it.

Ronnie props his cheek against her head and doesn’t say anything else, just stroking her back mindlessly until she feels the weight of the day settle on her.  The same feeling she’s had before clicks into place—the feeling of being slightly off-kilter—and this time she lets herself acknowledge it.  Ronnie is a slender guy, built like a runner.  She misses broader shoulders and a steadier build, bigger hands and a deeper voice.

She misses Jake.

“I’m sorry,” Cassie murmurs again.

The last thing she hears before she falls asleep is Ronnie’s voice.  “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Whether this becomes an AU where Cassie reaches out to Jake and maybe the _Rachel_ goes differently, or if this is just canon and they're both too broken to get back in touch and Cassie/Ronnie gets back together, is pretty much up to you, I don't have a strong headcanon either way. (...my shipper heart says AU though.)
> 
> Come talk to me about Animorphs on [Tumblr!](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/)


End file.
